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Adding author’s email in SUSI skill files

You can create SUSI skills by using skills.susi.ai. When you create a skill, a text file is created and stored in the server. A file can contain many skills inside it, and is thus called an “expert”. The text file contains the metadata like the author’s name, author’s url, description, etc, but it does not contains the author’s email id. Certainly, storing the author’s email along with the skill can be very useful to stuff like get skills for a particular author. But if we provide the option to the user to enter their email, it can easily be misused since they can add emails of other persons. This blog explains how the metadata in the skill file are send by the client and interpreted by the server, and how the author’s email is added to the text file in a secured way.

Representing and storing metadata in the expert file

Let’s take a look at how the metadata is represented in the expert file. The lines containing the metadata are preceded with “::”. This lets the parser in the server to easily identify the metadata. Now, we can add a new line for the author_email. But if the user is asked to enter email themselves, they can easily add skills in the name of other authors. Thus we need to securely add this data.

Extracting and adding the author’s email

When the user logs in, their email and access_token is stored in a “cookie”. The email id can be extracted by cookies.get(’emailId’)and the access token can be extracted by cookies.get(‘loggedIn’). Our approach will be to extract the email id, and append it at the top of the expert file.

This how the email is appended and the file is being send to the server in CreateSkill.js file:

Making changes in the server to store the author’s email

Since we have just added the author_email in the text file itself similar to the other metadata, we don’t have to do much structural changes in the server side. We just have to add code to detect the ‘author_email’ metadata similar to the other metadata.

In SusiSkill.java file, we add author_email attribute where-ever the other meta data are already present.

And in SusiMind.java file, we add the following lines in the learn() function: